RE: Seriously?

In Reply to:
RE: Seriously? posted by Analog Scott
on September 2, 2012 at 09:31:46:

>OK I will remind you of what you said on the subject."Yuja Wang's rhythms are wrong, and where they aren't wrong, they're unsophisticated."

Scott, I know what I said. I'm just not sure why that has anything to do with the URL I provided, since I didn't make that post until later.

"If you are going to assert that your claims on these alleged 'rhythmic anomalies' are valid based on your familiarity with the genre you can't claim logical fallacy when an opposing position is presented by someone who is clearly more familiar with that genre."

You've made a logical error here, confounding "one must be familiar with a genre to make judgments" with "familiarity with a genre confers the ability to make judgments." Do you question the former? I certainly question the latter.

[Tchaikovsky] Tchaikovsky did make such objective assertions about Brahms, and about Bach as well. I disagree with them, just as I disagree with the judgment of these two jazz musicians.

"I think you lose the argument if that is the criteria."

I think it has no effect on the argument one way or the other. It is merely an observation about the nature of judgment, and why professionals don't necessarily have judgment that's superior to non-professionals.

You keep personifying this when neither ad hominems nor argument from authority -- which as I think about it are flip sides of the same thing -- have any validity.

"If that is your position I think you are plainly wrong. One can not excel at anything without the ability to evaluate the success of their en devours and the en devours of others. There is no way a musician as well versed in jazz as Sasha Mazakowski is going to miss objectively 'wrong rhythms' or 'rhythmic anomalies'."

If that were true, all professional musicians would have equal interpretive skills. I don't think you'll find many who say that they do. Furthermore, you persist in oversimplifying style, supposing that it is something that a musicologist could describe. Except in the most basic degree, we aren't able to do that.

What makes Schnabel's performance of the Hammerklavier so compelling? Certainly not technical virtuosity -- there are many pianists who have fleeter, more reliable, fingers. Can what makes his performance be described in entirely mechanistic terms? I don't think so. Not of course because there's no logic to it, but because we lack the analytical tools to do so. We can say so-and-so played with gusto, or rare understanding, or sensitivity, and critics regularly do. Or we can say he took the andante too fast, or that her intonation was off. But we can't put into words everything that makes a performance great. We can only hear it (or not), and respond to it.

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